Scalable and network aware video coding for advanced communications over heterogeneous networks

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and was awarded by Brunel UniversityThis work addresses the issues concerned with the provision of scalable video services over heterogeneous networks particularly with regards to dynamic adaptation and user’s acceptable quality of service. In order to provide and sustain an adaptive and network friendly multimedia communication service, a suite of techniques that achieved automatic scalability and adaptation are developed. These techniques are evaluated objectively and subjectively to assess the Quality of Service (QoS) provided to diverse users with variable constraints and dynamic resources. The research ensured the consideration of various levels of user acceptable QoS The techniques are further evaluated with view to establish their performance against state of the art scalable and non-scalable techniques. To further improve the adaptability of the designed techniques, several experiments and real time simulations are conducted with the aim of determining the optimum performance with various coding parameters and scenarios. The coding parameters and scenarios are evaluated and analyzed to determine their performance using various types of video content and formats. Several algorithms are developed to provide a dynamic adaptation of coding tools and parameters to specific video content type, format and bandwidth of transmission. Due to the nature of heterogeneous networks where channel conditions, terminals, users capabilities and preferences etc are unpredictably changing, hence limiting the adaptability of a specific technique adopted, a Dynamic Scalability Decision Making Algorithm (SADMA) is developed. The algorithm autonomously selects one of the designed scalability techniques basing its decision on the monitored and reported channel conditions. Experiments were conducted using a purpose-built heterogeneous network simulator and the network-aware selection of the scalability techniques is based on real time simulation results. A technique with a minimum delay, low bit-rate, low frame rate and low quality is adopted as a reactive measure to a predicted bad channel condition. If the use of the techniques is not favoured due to deteriorating channel conditions reported, a reduced layered stream or base layer is used. If the network status does not allow the use of the base layer, then the stream uses parameter identifiers with high efficiency to improve the scalability and adaptation of the video service. To further improve the flexibility and efficiency of the algorithm, a dynamic de-blocking filter and lambda value selection are analyzed and introduced in the algorithm. Various methods, interfaces and algorithms are defined for transcoding from one technique to another and extracting sub-streams when the network conditions do not allow for the transmission of the entire bit-stream

Description-driven Adaptation of Media Resources

The current multimedia landscape is characterized by a significant diversity in terms of available media formats, network technologies, and device properties. This heterogeneity has resulted in a number of new challenges, such as providing universal access to multimedia content. A solution for this diversity is the use of scalable bit streams, as well as the deployment of a complementary system that is capable of adapting scalable bit streams to the constraints imposed by a particular usage environment (e.g., the limited screen resolution of a mobile device). This dissertation investigates the use of an XML-driven (Extensible Markup Language) framework for the format-independent adaptation of scalable bit streams. Using this approach, the structure of a bit stream is first translated into an XML description. In a next step, the resulting XML description is transformed to reflect a desired adaptation of the bit stream. Finally, the transformed XML description is used to create an adapted bit stream that is suited for playback in the targeted usage environment. The main contribution of this dissertation is BFlavor, a new tool for exposing the syntax of binary media resources as an XML description. Its development was inspired by two other technologies, i.e. MPEG-21 BSDL (Bitstream Syntax Description Language) and XFlavor (Formal Language for Audio-Visual Object Representation, extended with XML features). Although created from a different point of view, both languages offer solutions for translating the syntax of a media resource into an XML representation for further processing. BFlavor (BSDL+XFlavor) harmonizes the two technologies by combining their strengths and eliminating their weaknesses. The expressive power and performance of a BFlavor-based content adaptation chain, compared to tool chains entirely based on either BSDL or XFlavor, were investigated by several experiments. One series of experiments targeted the exploitation of multi-layered temporal scalability in H.264/AVC, paying particular attention to the use of sub-sequences and hierarchical coding patterns, as well as to the use of metadata messages to communicate the bit stream structure to the adaptation logic. BFlavor was the only tool to offer an elegant and practical solution for XML-driven adaptation of H.264/AVC bit streams in the temporal domain

LOCO-ANS: An Optimization of JPEG-LS Using an Efficient and Low-Complexity Coder Based on ANS

Near-lossless compression is a generalization of lossless compression, where the codec user is able to set the maximum absolute difference (the error tolerance) between the values of an original pixel and the decoded one. This enables higher compression ratios, while still allowing the control of the bounds of the quantization errors in the space domain. This feature makes them attractive for applications where a high degree of certainty is required. The JPEG-LS lossless and near-lossless image compression standard combines a good compression ratio with a low computational complexity, which makes it very suitable for scenarios with strong restrictions, common in embedded systems. However, our analysis shows great coding efficiency improvement potential, especially for lower entropy distributions, more common in near-lossless. In this work, we propose enhancements to the JPEG-LS standard, aimed at improving its coding efficiency at a low computational overhead, particularly for hardware implementations. The main contribution is a low complexity and efficient coder, based on Tabled Asymmetric Numeral Systems (tANS), well suited for a wide range of entropy sources and with simple hardware implementation. This coder enables further optimizations, resulting in great compression ratio improvements. When targeting photographic images, the proposed system is capable of achieving, in mean, 1.6%, 6%, and 37.6% better compression for error tolerances of 0, 1, and 10, respectively. Additional improvements are achieved increasing the context size and image tiling, obtaining 2.3% lower bpp for lossless compression. Our results also show that our proposal compares favorably against state-of-the-art codecs like JPEG-XL and WebP, particularly in near-lossless, where it achieves higher compression ratios with a faster coding speedThis work was supported in part by the Spanish Research Agency through the Project AgileMon under Grant AEI PID2019-104451RB-C2

Distributed and Lightweight Meta-heuristic Optimization method for Complex Problems

The world is becoming more prominent and more complex every day. The resources are limited and efficiently use them is one of the most requirement. Finding an Efficient and optimal solution in complex problems needs to practical methods. During the last decades, several optimization approaches have been presented that they can apply to different optimization problems, and they can achieve different performance on various problems. Different parameters can have a significant effect on the results, such as the type of search spaces. Between the main categories of optimization methods (deterministic and stochastic methods), stochastic optimization methods work more efficient on big complex problems than deterministic methods. But in highly complex problems, stochastic optimization methods also have some issues, such as execution time, convergence to local optimum, incompatible with distributed systems, and dependence on the type of search spaces. Therefore this thesis presents a distributed and lightweight metaheuristic optimization method (MICGA) for complex problems focusing on four main tracks. 1) The primary goal is to improve the execution time by MICGA. 2) The proposed method increases the stability and reliability of the results by using the multi-population strategy in the second track. 3) MICGA is compatible with distributed systems. 4) Finally, MICGA is applied to the different type of optimization problems with other kinds of search spaces (continuous, discrete and order based optimization problems). MICGA has been compared with other efficient optimization approaches. The results show the proposed work has been achieved enough improvement on the main issues of the stochastic methods that are mentioned before.Maailmasta on päivä päivältä tulossa yhä monimutkaisempi. Resurssit ovat rajalliset, ja siksi niiden tehokas käyttö on erittäin tärkeää. Tehokkaan ja optimaalisen ratkaisun löytäminen monimutkaisiin ongelmiin vaatii tehokkaita käytännön menetelmiä. Viime vuosikymmenien aikana on ehdotettu useita optimointimenetelmiä, joilla jokaisella on vahvuutensa ja heikkoutensa suorituskyvyn ja tarkkuuden suhteen erityyppisten ongelmien ratkaisemisessa. Parametreilla, kuten hakuavaruuden tyypillä, voi olla merkittävä vaikutus tuloksiin. Optimointimenetelmien pääryhmistä (deterministiset ja stokastiset menetelmät) stokastinen optimointi toimii suurissa monimutkaisissa ongelmissa tehokkaammin kuin deterministinen optimointi. Erittäin monimutkaisissa ongelmissa stokastisilla optimointimenetelmillä on kuitenkin myös joitain ongelmia, kuten korkeat suoritusajat, päätyminen paikallisiin optimipisteisiin, yhteensopimattomuus hajautetun toteutuksen kanssa ja riippuvuus hakuavaruuden tyypistä. Tämä opinnäytetyö esittelee hajautetun ja kevyen metaheuristisen optimointimenetelmän (MICGA) monimutkaisille ongelmille keskittyen neljään päätavoitteeseen: 1) Ensisijaisena tavoitteena on pienentää suoritusaikaa MICGA:n avulla. 2) Lisäksi ehdotettu menetelmä lisää tulosten vakautta ja luotettavuutta käyttämällä monipopulaatiostrategiaa. 3) MICGA tukee hajautettua toteutusta. 4) Lopuksi MICGA-menetelmää sovelletaan erilaisiin optimointiongelmiin, jotka edustavat erityyppisiä hakuavaruuksia (jatkuvat, diskreetit ja järjestykseen perustuvat optimointiongelmat). Työssä MICGA-menetelmää verrataan muihin tehokkaisiin optimointimenetelmiin. Tulokset osoittavat, että ehdotetulla menetelmällä saavutetaan selkeitä parannuksia yllä mainittuihin stokastisten menetelmien pääongelmiin liittyen

Design Techniques for Energy-Quality Scalable Digital Systems

Energy efficiency is one of the key design goals in modern computing. Increasingly complex tasks are being executed in mobile devices and Internet of Things end-nodes, which are expected to operate for long time intervals, in the orders of months or years, with the limited energy budgets provided by small form-factor batteries. Fortunately, many of such tasks are error resilient, meaning that they can toler- ate some relaxation in the accuracy, precision or reliability of internal operations, without a significant impact on the overall output quality. The error resilience of an application may derive from a number of factors. The processing of analog sensor inputs measuring quantities from the physical world may not always require maximum precision, as the amount of information that can be extracted is limited by the presence of external noise. Outputs destined for human consumption may also contain small or occasional errors, thanks to the limited capabilities of our vision and hearing systems. Finally, some computational patterns commonly found in domains such as statistics, machine learning and operational research, naturally tend to reduce or eliminate errors. Energy-Quality (EQ) scalable digital systems systematically trade off the quality of computations with energy efficiency, by relaxing the precision, the accuracy, or the reliability of internal software and hardware components in exchange for energy reductions. This design paradigm is believed to offer one of the most promising solutions to the impelling need for low-energy computing. Despite these high expectations, the current state-of-the-art in EQ scalable design suffers from important shortcomings. First, the great majority of techniques proposed in literature focus only on processing hardware and software components. Nonetheless, for many real devices, processing contributes only to a small portion of the total energy consumption, which is dominated by other components (e.g. I/O, memory or data transfers). Second, in order to fulfill its promises and become diffused in commercial devices, EQ scalable design needs to achieve industrial level maturity. This involves moving from purely academic research based on high-level models and theoretical assumptions to engineered flows compatible with existing industry standards. Third, the time-varying nature of error tolerance, both among different applications and within a single task, should become more central in the proposed design methods. This involves designing “dynamic” systems in which the precision or reliability of operations (and consequently their energy consumption) can be dynamically tuned at runtime, rather than “static” solutions, in which the output quality is fixed at design-time. This thesis introduces several new EQ scalable design techniques for digital systems that take the previous observations into account. Besides processing, the proposed methods apply the principles of EQ scalable design also to interconnects and peripherals, which are often relevant contributors to the total energy in sensor nodes and mobile systems respectively. Regardless of the target component, the presented techniques pay special attention to the accurate evaluation of benefits and overheads deriving from EQ scalability, using industrial-level models, and on the integration with existing standard tools and protocols. Moreover, all the works presented in this thesis allow the dynamic reconfiguration of output quality and energy consumption. More specifically, the contribution of this thesis is divided in three parts. In a first body of work, the design of EQ scalable modules for processing hardware data paths is considered. Three design flows are presented, targeting different technologies and exploiting different ways to achieve EQ scalability, i.e. timing-induced errors and precision reduction. These works are inspired by previous approaches from the literature, namely Reduced-Precision Redundancy and Dynamic Accuracy Scaling, which are re-thought to make them compatible with standard Electronic Design Automation (EDA) tools and flows, providing solutions to overcome their main limitations. The second part of the thesis investigates the application of EQ scalable design to serial interconnects, which are the de facto standard for data exchanges between processing hardware and sensors. In this context, two novel bus encodings are proposed, called Approximate Differential Encoding and Serial-T0, that exploit the statistical characteristics of data produced by sensors to reduce the energy consumption on the bus at the cost of controlled data approximations. The two techniques achieve different results for data of different origins, but share the common features of allowing runtime reconfiguration of the allowed error and being compatible with standard serial bus protocols. Finally, the last part of the manuscript is devoted to the application of EQ scalable design principles to displays, which are often among the most energy- hungry components in mobile systems. The two proposals in this context leverage the emissive nature of Organic Light-Emitting Diode (OLED) displays to save energy by altering the displayed image, thus inducing an output quality reduction that depends on the amount of such alteration. The first technique implements an image-adaptive form of brightness scaling, whose outputs are optimized in terms of balance between power consumption and similarity with the input. The second approach achieves concurrent power reduction and image enhancement, by means of an adaptive polynomial transformation. Both solutions focus on minimizing the overheads associated with a real-time implementation of the transformations in software or hardware, so that these do not offset the savings in the display. For each of these three topics, results show that the aforementioned goal of building EQ scalable systems compatible with existing best practices and mature for being integrated in commercial devices can be effectively achieved. Moreover, they also show that very simple and similar principles can be applied to design EQ scalable versions of different system components (processing, peripherals and I/O), and to equip these components with knobs for the runtime reconfiguration of the energy versus quality tradeoff

Artificial Intelligence in the Creative Industries: A Review

This paper reviews the current state of the art in Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies and applications in the context of the creative industries. A brief background of AI, and specifically Machine Learning (ML) algorithms, is provided including Convolutional Neural Network (CNNs), Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) and Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL). We categorise creative applications into five groups related to how AI technologies are used: i) content creation, ii) information analysis, iii) content enhancement and post production workflows, iv) information extraction and enhancement, and v) data compression. We critically examine the successes and limitations of this rapidly advancing technology in each of these areas. We further differentiate between the use of AI as a creative tool and its potential as a creator in its own right. We foresee that, in the near future, machine learning-based AI will be adopted widely as a tool or collaborative assistant for creativity. In contrast, we observe that the successes of machine learning in domains with fewer constraints, where AI is the `creator', remain modest. The potential of AI (or its developers) to win awards for its original creations in competition with human creatives is also limited, based on contemporary technologies. We therefore conclude that, in the context of creative industries, maximum benefit from AI will be derived where its focus is human centric -- where it is designed to augment, rather than replace, human creativity

Deep Learning for Free-Hand Sketch: A Survey

Free-hand sketches are highly illustrative, and have been widely used by humans to depict objects or stories from ancient times to the present. The recent prevalence of touchscreen devices has made sketch creation a much easier task than ever and consequently made sketch-oriented applications increasingly popular. The progress of deep learning has immensely benefited free-hand sketch research and applications. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of the deep learning techniques oriented at free-hand sketch data, and the applications that they enable. The main contents of this survey include: (i) A discussion of the intrinsic traits and unique challenges of free-hand sketch, to highlight the essential differences between sketch data and other data modalities, e.g., natural photos. (ii) A review of the developments of free-hand sketch research in the deep learning era, by surveying existing datasets, research topics, and the state-of-the-art methods through a detailed taxonomy and experimental evaluation. (iii) Promotion of future work via a discussion of bottlenecks, open problems, and potential research directions for the community.Comment: This paper is accepted by IEEE TPAM

Contributions to reconfigurable video coding and low bit rate video coding

In this PhD Thesis, two different issues on video coding are stated and their corresponding proposed solutions discussed. In the first place, some problems of the use of video coding standards are identi ed and the potential of new reconfigurable platforms is put to the test. Specifically, the proposal from MPEG for a Reconfigurable Video Coding (RVC) standard is compared with a more ambitious proposal for Fully Configurable Video Coding (FCVC). In both cases, the objective is to nd a way for the definition of new video codecs without the concurrence of a classical standardization process, in order to reduce the time-to-market of new ideas while maintaining the proper interoperability between codecs. The main difference between these approaches is the ability of FCVC to reconfigure each program line in the encoder and decoder definition, while RVC only enables to conform the codec description from a database of standardized functional units. The proof of concept carried out in the FCVC prototype enabled to propose the incorporation of some of the FCVC capabilities in future versions of the RVC standard. The second part of the Thesis deals with the design and implementation of a filtering algorithm in a hybrid video encoder in order to simplify the high frequencies present in the prediction residue, which are the most expensive for the encoder in terms of output bit rate. By means of this filtering, the quantization scale employed by the video encoder in low bit rate is kept in reasonable values and the risk of appearance of encoding artifacts is reduced. The proposed algorithm includes a block for filter control that determines the proper amount of filtering from the encoder operating point and the characteristics of the sequence to be processed. This filter control is tuned according to perceptual considerations related with overall subjective quality assessment. Finally, the complete algorithm was tested by means of a standard subjective video quality assessment test, and the results showed a noticeable improvement in the quality score with respect to the non-filtered version, confirming that the proposed method reduces the presence of harmful low bit rate artifacts